I know a tiny bit about some of it mostly because of one of the three major auction houses being in Dallas, although their art department is dust in the wind compared to Sotheby’s, who had a 250 year head start.
Transparency in tracking funds has done a 180° in the last two decades, and it’s no longer a snap for Russian mafiosi or cocaine cartels to hide and/or launder money there. I know that Heritage was extremely careful to be 100% above board with the Nobel prize medal, and that was a charity affair.
A cousin of mine used to be on the tax court in New York. There, too, the big players were forced to take many anti-laundering measures that ate into some potential profits.
I had superficial contact with the world of modern art as a teenager. One of my grandmothers, who lived in NYC, the one fired by Mayor Laguardia as labor liason for being “too friendly with labor,” was friendly with some “modern” artists of her day. One was a Ticinese from Switzerland named Alberto Giacometti. She had a couple of his smaller bronze sculptures in her apartment. When she died in 1966, one of my cousins wanted one of those bronzes, but it was assessed at $16,000, and his parents couldn’t afford the $8000 estate tax it would have cost to keep it. Sotheby’s, as a matter of fact, sold it at auction in 1967 for $25,000. My cousin was probably ill when it came up for auction again in 2007 and brought $4 million. My grandmother bought her “collection” from living artists she knew and supported. She was never a part of a world of gazillion dollar paintings, although in the mid sixties, a couple hundred dollars for a painting or a bronze sculptures seemed like a fortune to me.
Until my dad once introduced me to Nelson Rockefeller (his beat was covering goings-on in DC affecting Great Lakes states), I never even met someone with THAT kind of wealth. It was difficult for me to grasp. He seemed a nice enough guy to me, but what did I know? He was probably just a kid or a teenager while his dad was ruining New Jersey’s chances of ever having a European-style commuter rail system, so that everyone would need to buy his oil.
The thing is, I get the impression that the huge wealth inequality won’t be alleviated by doing a wholesale Nazi-style Enteignung, because the guys most deserving of it have long known that they’d be targets sooner or later, and made arrangements. I thought the scheme of guys like Musk and Bezos was genius in its simplicity. Build up a huge company and own massive amounts of stock in it. Then borrow against the stock at whatever rate you decide to charge yourself. Nothing has been sold, so no taxable profits have been generated. And yet, you are rolling in massive quantities of legal cash. If just ONE of those guys had been working on the Senate Finance Committee instead of for himself, thirty years ago, and slipped it into law that such a scheme was illegal, no one would even been able to get started with it when stock portfolios of one’s own company became worth tens or hundreds of billions. They were always steps ahead because they had an incentive to do it. We need the same creativity in Congress, or we’ll always be a step behind. Sharper minds than mine are needed. I want not just Jon Ossoff in the Senate. I want a couple of dozen Jon Ossoffs in the Senate. Not just dedication, but the smarts to go with it. I still believe that with four back-to-back terms of a Democrat in the White House and a benevolent Congress, we can again balance the budget. We have some serious damage control to do, and I fear it will take the better part of the first term of the next Democratic president just to address that. But I think it CAN be done. But with new solutions. Not because the old ones were necessarily wrong, but because those people who have the most to lose already took pre-emptive measures. THAT is why we, both as a party and a country, need to get creative rather than reactive or vindictive. Here in Germany, the left foolishly tried to introduce a wealth tax, like the hated ones in place in France, Belgium and Holland. Why foolish? Because after the National Socialists used one target you-know-who, the post-war German constitution expressly forbade double taxation. If you have money that has been taxed, no matter how much it is, no government can step in and say, “you have too much, we’re here to take more.” One German pollitician called it a “Neidsteuer,” or a “jealousy tax,” which, during the Nazi era, it pretty much was. When the postwar politicians tried to enact one, and it came before the German supreme court, they nearly rolled their eyes, asking, “what part of no double taxationdid you NOT understand?”
Don’t get me wrong, there IS real income inequality in Germany, too, and if you think OUR bureaucracy is bad, the Europeans could teach us a lesson or two on how to set up a people-unfriendly bureaucracy. But I find, even after the Trump disasters, that creativity and innovation, in the right hands, are what will finally pull us out of the mire.
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